ABSTRACT

In his treatise Des monstres et prodiges (On monsters and prodigies), first published in 1573, the French surgeon Ambroise Paré concluded his chapter on hermaphrodites with a detailed description of the female genitals under the rubric “Extremely monstrous thing that occurs in the labia [nimphes] of some women.” On occasion, he wrote, these are so developed that they can erect when stimulated, “like the male penis, so that they can be used to play with other women.” 1 In the second edition (1575), he expanded this discussion with a detailed account of the activities of the female diviners of Fez, in Mauritania, taken almost verbatim from the French translation of Leo Africanus's Historical Description of Africa (1556). These were supposedly called in by other women, who pretended to be ill or possessed in order to enjoy the diviners' sexual services and who even used their own gullible husbands as go-betweens. Some of these, however, “having perceptively recognized the ruse, exorcize the bodies of their wives with fine blows and beatings,” as Paré put it. “This is described by Leo Africanus, who indicates elsewhere that there are people in Africa who go around the city like our [livestock] castratore and make a career of cutting off those excrescences.” 2